What is the purpose of life?

An eternal question, what is the purpose of life?, occupied philosophers’ thoughts throughout history. Stone pictographs reveal even primitive peoples reflected on this query. Each one has the capacity to define his or her personal thinking about politics, economics and religion.

Discussion Forum

Michael Hudson: How Private Debt Makes the Rich RicherMichael Hudson talks about the causes of inequality in the 21st century. He summarizes the important theses from his new book "The Sector - Why Global Finance Is Destroying Us". for a symposium…Continue

Meet the Renegades Steve KeenSteve Keen’s, one of the very few economists, globally, perfectly predicted the 2007-08 financial crisis. Recently he predicted the Chinese economic downturn and the deflation…Continue

"If she just would have gotten to know us…maybe it would have gone a different way" said Arthur Levitt, former chairman of the SEC, in an excellent 2009 Frontline episode titled The Warning. The 'she' Levitt refers to is Brooksley Born, former Chair of the Commodity and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), who waged an unsuccessful campaign to regulate the multitrillion dollar derivatives market, whose crash helped trigger the recent financial collapse.

Ms. Born, the first female president of the Law Review at Stanford, the first female to finish at the top of the class, and an expert in commodities and futures, was brought in by the Clinton Administration to run the (CFTC), a little known regulatory backwater. Soon after assuming the reins, she became aware of the over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives market, a rapidly expanding and opaque market, which she attempted to regulate. According to Frontline, "Her attempts to regulate derivatives ran into fierce resistance from then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and then-Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who prevailed upon Congress to stop Born and limit future regulation." Put more directly by NY Times reporter Timothy O'Brien, "they...shut her up and shut her down."

“Brooksley Born, one of the great heroes of this whole crisis, the one who tried to protect us from some of these financial derivatives and got squashed by Alan Greenspan. What she had to say that was particularly interesting … is the race to the bottom, the competition in laxity in regulation.”

Brooksley Born reported, “Treasury and Geithner are way too close to the biggest banks, particularly Citicorp, that they ran the bailout completely for the largest banks, not for the public, even though the public was frequently innocent and the banks had the great culpability. So this is just an absolute blast at Geithner. And again I would remind people: Geithner was a registered Republican until he was going to be head of Treasury and, as a fig leaf became an Independent. So this is a fight within at least fairly conservative Republican mindsets, saying, you sold out to the big banks.”

"Obama developed a "man crush" on Geithner and decided to follow Geithner's policies to bail out the banksters rather than hold them accountable for the frauds that made them wealthy and caused the Great Recession. Obama's "man crush" is particularly odd given the fact that Geithner is a Republican who, as a fig leaf, became an independent."

Education intended to teach children to obey, to follow directions, to give the "right answer", to yield to authority, to look outside oneself for the correct response, to seek from others the meaning of events results in an adult trained to be an obedient laborer, to not cause trouble, to follow the rules, to give up critical thinking and to be a good worker for someone else's enterprise.

Chomsky said, "The Enlightenment ideal of education was captured in the image of education as laying down a string that students follow in their own ways, developing their creativity and independence of mind.

"The alternative, to be rejected, is the image of pouring water into a vessel – and a very leaky one, as all of us know from experience. The latter approach includes teaching to test and other mechanisms that destroy students' interest and seek to fit them into a mold, easily controlled. All too familiar today."

In subjects of natural laws, a student needs to learn the principles of physics and mathematics, and evolution and these are topics one learns, not through obedience, but through inquiry, through reasoning, through experimentation, through living in the question.

In matters of beliefs, a student needs to be able to differentiate the difference between attitudes, beliefs, customs, traditions and values that come to us through some external "giver of knowledge". If a belief is invalid, the value is invalid. An educated person can test, question, doubt. That distinction between laws of nature and laws of humans is part of being educated.

“There was one field in which man was unsurpassed; he showed unlimited ingenuity in devising bigger and more efficient ways to kill off, enslave, harass, and in all ways make an unbearable nuisance of himself to himself. Man was his own grimmest joke on himself.”~ Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

A cello performance with a very good impersonation of visceral experiences of today's politics, economy and religion, all seeming to be reaching a frenetic crescendo of chaos at the same time in history, with a fear that it will all melt down to nothing, even as we hold a faint hope that order, good sense and compassion emerges.Ruth, I like you contribution on these issues.

While a cello performance seems irrelevant to Politics, Economics & Religion, this piece by Smells Like Teen Spirit captures the feel of that nexus today, with its heavy balance of frenetic/distorted/intense to serene/calm/sane. This is my nervous system submerged in the swirling current of economics/politics/religion/now.

That snap poll that said 67% thought Romney won the presidential debate had me worried. But the uncommitted voters in the audience turned out to be "nearly all white, Southern and over 50." Not representative at all of US citizenry. It sounds like the Republicans managed to hoodwink us again, stuffing the peanut gallery, to give the impression their guy would win and discourage Dems.